Chariots of Rubbish Part 1: Introduction

Welcome to Chariots of Rubbish!

ON WHAT'S GOING ON HERE

Chariots of Fire is a fast and simple system to race oddly constructed cars. With five rolls of a d30, you can have yourself a weird and wacky vehicle. Racing is as simple as rolling a d10 and adding a stat. There's rules for dirty tricks, mooks, weapons, horrible crashes and Dracula. Packed with random tables and plays pretty fast to boot.

If any of that sounds interesting, read on!

ON SETTING

These rules presumes three things.

One: You want to race a whole mess of cars.

Two: You're gonna build them in a junkyard.

Three: Some of them will blow up.

All you need to add is a setting and a reason to race. For me, that's the TRASHLINE.

The REDLINE is the biggest and most dangerous race in the galaxy. To even qualify for it, you need to win one of the eight YELLOWLINE races. And to qualify for one of those, you need to win a BLUELINE race.

But below that, for the people who can't even scrounge up a half decent racing rig, there's what's called a TRASHLINE. You and a bunch of your idiot friends head down to the local junkyard, hiss, spit and fight over the scraps, and then build something terrible from 'em. Maybe if you win the TRASHLINE in your bucket of bolts, the prize money will be enough to buy a real racer.

But that's just me! Feel free to use whatever setting and reason you want. Here's a couple others I scrounged up.

SETTINGS

1. You live in a HOL: a human occupied landfill. No one knows where the trash is coming from, but the local tribes survive by turning it into useful shit.
2. It's Mad Max baby! The bombs fell, the whole world looks like Australia, and everyone wears a lot of leather.
3. Warhammer 40k Hivecity: it's a bit like five cities all stacked on top of each other. In between the Hives is the ash wastes, full of firestorms, toxic waste, and raiders. It's a toss up as to which is more dangerous.
4. Carcosa. Mind the dinosaurs, and don’t run out of wizard blood for your engines. Summoning Cthulhu isn't advised, but all too likely.
5. Cyberpunk metropolis. The junkyards is the only place the corps don't watch!
6. Qelong. A haunted, blasted jungle being torn apart by titanic magics. Mind the monks, ghosts, and carnivorous ants as you go tearing through the temples.

REASONS

1. Win a race!
2. You stole something! Run for your life!
3. That son of a bitch stole something! Go get him!
4. The first one to tell the supreme overlord that we've won the war is going to get knighted!
5. Something fell from the sky! First one to get there keeps it.
6. You need to protect the tanker full of oil from the raiders!
7. You need to get that tanker! Smash the guards!
8. OH GODS IT’S A MONSTER EVERYONE RUN FOR IT.